domain:link.springer.com
2rafa
6m ago
They know this already, Ukraine has always (well…) been a nuclear threshold state.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
6m ago
If america were to raid India or China or Israel, will people of the respective ethnicities not have a very high chance of siding with nations they come from?
This has been a concern throughout American history and there have been some level of sabatuar and unrest during wars from time to time. But most Americans, especially immigrants who choose to assimilate, side with America. People who drop everything with the dream of Being American, a sovereign in themselves, with unalienable rights and infinite opportunity, don't defect so easily. At least not when selected carefully.
Rov_Scam
7m ago
Your analogy doesn't hold because the purpose of a civil suit isn't to punish the defendant but to compensate the plaintiffs for their loss. There were 15 plaintiffs in the case, and each was awarded about 64 million in compensatory damages. The judge then added on another 30 million per plaintiff in punitive damages (and if there ever were a case for punitive damages, this is the one). On a per-plaintiff basis, it's more like 35 dollars an hour for the punitive part. And he didn't lose the suit because he denied the event had happened in a general sense. An equivalent to your analogy would be if a holocaust denier, who admits that he actually believes the holocaust really happened, publicly denied it, claimed specific survivors were merely actors, posted their addresses and phone numbers, and encouraged a decade-long pattern of harassment for the purpose of making money.
Anyway, the analogy doesn't hold because it suggests that civil verdicts should be dependent on how highly you value time incarcerated. If you destroy a piece of artwork worth tens of millions of dollars, the theoretical civil settlement will be worth a lot more than the max 7 years in prison if you're doing some kind of hourly rate equivalent.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
13m ago
He also said the Russian leadership shared some blame for believing his policies.
They had a much more important goal in mind than improving the economy: destroying the power of socialists. Their biggest fear was Russia turning red again, so they had to break both the political and the economic power of the old regime. To achieve the latter, they decided to speedrun the primitive accumulation of capital by privatizing as many companies as possible, usually at a loss and to anyone who looked like a capitalist. When the dust settled, the economy was in shambles, but the bulk of property was now in private hands, no takesies backsies.
Of course, Putin rewrote the social contract between the state and the oligarchs ten years later, but by that time the threat of a red revanche had passed.
grognard
Intel Pentium III 450 / Nvidia Riva TNT2 Ultra / Corsair 128MB PC133 / ABIT BH6
18m ago
I haven’t done a deep dive, but there exists this website to compile evidence:
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
24m ago
It's weird because a lot of the manosphere is black. Especially in the post-Kevin Samuels era.
This is actually a surprise to me - I haven't been spending much time in the manosphere since Heartiste went down, so my knowledge might be a bit out of date. I recall even the black people in the manosphere generally accepted the premises of HBD back then, given that if what you're caring about is being able to have sex with lots of women being black doesn't really handicap you there.
ControlsFreak
25m ago
Trump and the Republicans lack any sense of compassion whatsoever and have dehumanized them almost completely, giving them license to enact whatever brutal policies they can dream up.
This is the type of hyperbole that makes me find it completely impossible to hang out in online forums dominated by lefties for very long. Like, have you ever talked to a Republican? In person?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
28m ago
Assuming you mean “civil suit,” yeah. It would have been a criminal case rather than a tort, and he would most likely have ended up with multiple life sentences, since Connecticut banned the death penalty that same year.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
30m ago
Why stop at life in prison? Terry Nichols could meet Jones’ penalty at only $7.70 an hour.
But neither he nor Jones are expected to actual pay the balance of that debt. There’s a ceiling on how much you can penalize one person with one lifetime, and everything past that is about certainty. Terry Nichols will stay in prison for the rest of his life. Alex Jones will lose his assets. Why try to compare apples to oranges?
TIRM
30m ago
Some schools secretly socially transition children. Some locales will take children out of parents' custody if they fail to support transition. This is not all right wing paranoia.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
39m ago
My personal belief is that the election was "stolen" but I take a very limited perspective that I don't think really provides the information you're looking for - I think that the amount of actual electoral fraud wasn't that much greater or smaller than what is normal for American elections, but the "steal" largely happened when the intelligence community knowingly lied to the public about the provenance of the Hunter Biden laptop. There have been studies done which plausibly make the case that this actually tipped the election towards Biden, and it isn't really something that anyone on either side of politics tries to disagree with.
YoungAchamian
42m ago
I was introduced to the term "titalitarian"
Fun, and barely relevant anecdote, I was born very premature, like so premature that it was unlikely I was going to survive. I'm told I also cried nonstop for milk but never could latch on. The La Leche consultant (Activist) was absolutely nasty to my mother about allowing me to be bottle fed. It didn't matter if I died to her as long as I was breast-fed. Sufficed to say she reduced my mother to tears and a breakdown and my father almost got arrested throwing the activist out. I can totally imagine these people as the sort of crusaders that then get infected with woke-beliefs, but this is very much leopard-eating-my-face for them.
ABigGuy4U
45m ago
This nuke talk coming out of Ukraine seems absolutely insane. Arguably just this report alone gives Russia cause to use nuclear weapons against them, much more if they actually go and try to do that. It’s especially bad when combined with the constant grouching about how they need weapons that can hit the city of Moscow. Is Ukraine trying to provoke that kind of response?
Felagund
47m ago
I assume the question here has an intended answer (there wasn't much fraud).
Anyway, asking anyone who does think the 2020 election was stolen, do you have any examples of things that seem like obvious problems or evidence of substantial fraud? I'm currently inclined to think that there wasn't anything of that sort, but a lot of people seem really firmly convinced, so I'd be interested in seeing the evidence.
DirtyWaterHotDog
51m ago
Will the baby latch, will the latch hold, how to avoid painful latching, how to deal with chafing,
Doesn't pumping solve all 4 problems ?
YE_GUILTY
51m ago
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
It's probably my mere-mortal unsophistication compared to highfalutin' lawyers, but "eleventy gazillion dollars" civil judgments seem much, much more like violations of the spirit of the Eighth Amendment than prohibitions on sidewalk camping do.
FarmReadyElephants
1hr ago
A prominent, vocal greengrocer taking down his "worker's of the world, unite!" sign is a big deal.
Rov_Scam
1hr ago
Se my comment above, but AOC will have it a lot easier than Kamala, if only because it's a lot easier to backtrack from a position you took a decade earlier as an idealistic 29-year-old who was new to public office than from a position you took in the last election cycle as a 55-year-old sitting US Senator who had been in politics for 15 years by that point.
I mean, the "my values haven't changed" schtick wasn't good, but I can't imagine her saying anything that would have played better. California is an oil-producing state so she couldn't use ignorance as an excuse. The technology was old enough by 2019 that most of the specific arguments in favor of its environmental benefits had been made. There was no new information that came out between 2020 and 2024. If she'd been against fracking in 2012 and changed course in 2019 it would have been easy to give her a pass, but there's really no good explanation. The real explanation is probably that she's against a fracking ban now for the same reason she was in favor of one in 2019 — because that's the position her advisors told her would give her the best chance of winning, which leads one to wonder what her actual thoughts on the matter are.
zoink
1hr ago
If Jones had killed those kids the civil suite would have been a fraction of this.
Rov_Scam
1hr ago
Honestly, the immigration thing is the easiest issue on which to thread that needle. The people crossing the border are mostly normal people in really desperate situations who hope they can have a better life in the US. While there are practical reasons why we can't let everyone in, Trump and the Republicans lack any sense of compassion whatsoever and have dehumanized them almost completely, giving them license to enact whatever brutal policies they can dream up. His political career literally rests on his belief that the vast majority of illegals are rapists and fentanyl traffickers who are only here so they can commit crimes. Her earlier positions were merely a reaction to Trump's policies at the time, and she was also young and idealistic. Ten years in politics has taught her the practical realities of governance, but we at least need to acknowledge that we're dealing with real people here and not faceless monsters.
Some of her other positions are going to be harder to backtrack from, but she has the advantage of coming into office young enough that she both gets a pass for her earlier positions and develops into a shrewd politician by the time she needs to.
some
1hr ago
Let's say Germany decided to bring the hammer down on some Shoah denier. It sentences him to life in prison, and assuming he is quite young and genetically excellent, he spends 100 years behind bars. This is 876600 hours. Each hour of Shoah deniers life spent unfree would have to valued at 1255 USD in order for his punishment to equal to that meted out to Jones.
This would be a draconian punishment by any standard, yet as you can see it pales to camparison to Jones's. And Jones denied an atrocity of a much much smaller scale.
I feel like "killed twice as many people" is pretty obviously "more lethal"?
There were 16,000 murders in the US in 2018, but "only" 3,340 murders in El Salvador. I guess this means the US was "pretty obviously" 5 times as dangerous as El Salvador?
No, because DUH, the US population is fifty times the size of El Salvador.
Even more pertinent example: millions of people have been killed with guns since they were invented, but nukes have only killed a quarter-million people. I guess this means guns are "pretty obviously" more lethal than nukes?
No, because DUH, hundreds of millions of bullets have been fired in combat situations, but nukes have only been deployed in combat situations a grand total of twice.
It's so obnoxious that you're just pretending you don't know what the phrases "per capita" or "case fatality rate" mean. Or pretending that you don't know that an older population will always have a higher death rate than a younger population, because that's what "life expectancy" means. Or pretending that you don't know that one can easily end up with worse health outcomes from contracting a moderately severe illness in a developing nation vs. contracting a very severe illness in a developed nation, because of differences in the standard of medical care. Or pretending you don't know the difference between "an otherwise healthy person contracts an extremely lethal disease and dies" vs. "an old person who has been in out of hospital for years as their body slowly breaks down picks up an opportunistic infection which finishes them off (when a young healthy person would have shrugged off the same infection without even needing to be hospitalised)". I mean, you obviously do understand all of the above. No one thinks a disease which only kills 1% of people it infects is more lethal than one which kills 10%. To spell it out, in case it wasn't already abundantly clear:
- Case fatality rate and infection fatality rate are the key metrics for gauging how lethal a disease is. Covid has killed 7 million people, but there have been at least 7 hundred million confirmed cases, meaning its case fatality rate is 1%. Its infection fatality rate might be 0.5% or even lower. By contrast, 90% of people who contract HIV ultimately die from it, generally because of an opportunistic infection they're unable to fight off because they're immunocompromised.
- Per capita death rates also matter, just like when comparing murder rates between countries. The global population has increased by 2.5 billion people since the start of the HIV crisis. Had there been 7 billion people on the planet in 1981, the death toll from HIV would have been proportionately higher.
- Older people are more likely to die than younger people - this is what the term "life expectancy" means. All things being equal, an older country will have a higher all-cause death rate than a younger one. At the start of the HIV crisis, the median age in the US was just shy of 30 years; at the start of Covid, it was 37. If the world population had been younger in 2020, the death toll from Covid would have been far lower. This is plainly demonstrated by the fact that many countries which had unusually low rates of Covid deaths per capita also having median ages far below the global average.
None of what I'm saying is controversial or in dispute: this is all extremely basic medicine. When ranking how dangerous diseases are, we take all this into account, which is why no one would take you seriously if you claimed that AIDS is less dangerous than pneumonia, even though pneumonia kills around 4 million people every year - because, duh, in many if not most cases pneumonia is just the straw that broke the camel's back, the illness that finally finished off an old person (or indeed a person with AIDS!) who was bound to die soon anyway.
From the person who is so gung-ho about "female" only having one meaning, you sure seem eager to redefine words all of the sudden.
I cannot believe my gender-critical opinions are now being used as ammunition with which to rubbish my apparently controversial claim that "diseases which kill a higher proportion of those infected with them are more lethal than those which kill a lower proportion". I look forward to the day when I tell someone that murders/100k of population is a more accurate gauge of how violent a country is than absolute number of murders, and they scoff and tell me how can they believe that, coming from someone who thinks Trump isn't Literally Hitler™?
Straight up, the important question: do you really think Covid would have had the same death toll if we had never imposed any restrictions, never asked anyone to mask up, etc.?
The meta-analysis from Johns Hopkins estimated that NPIs probably prevented 0.2% of Covid deaths, which seems near enough to zero as to make functionally no difference.
And NPIs were not costless actions: they caused thousands of additional deaths both in the short-term (suicides, drug overdoses and other deaths of despair) and long-term (many health services deemed "nonessential" were shut down for extended periods of time during Covid, meaning there are tens of thousands of people in the world right now who have cancer and don't know it, or who know it and would have received treatment for it several years earlier if not for the hysterical overreaction to Covid). It's rather telling that the only country in the EU which never imposed a lockdown, Sweden, actually ended up with fewer Covid deaths per capita than the EU average, suggesting that whatever effects lockdowns etc. can be completely dwarfed or negated by local factors (population density, climate, age of population etc.).
But can you acknowledge the very basic idea that at least one (1) extra person would have died?
This is such an obnoxious and emotionally manipulative way of phrasing a question. Governmental policies are supposed to pass a cost-benefit analysis. "One person who would've died didn't die as a result of this policy, ergo it's a roaring success" is a standard which literally any government policy in the world could meet with ease, ergo it's meaningless.
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
1hr ago
I wanted to make a meme like that for rdrama.net around Easter time with the soy devil screaming DO NOT REDEEM to bloodied Chad Jesus wearing the crown of thorns but was too lazy. Anyways, there's always next year...
In terms of AOC, this clip of hers asking Trump voters for who they follow came up on my Twitter feed the other day, so she could be actually trying to figure out why the Dems failed this election. Of course, many have called this just a Hundred Flowers Campaign, though I'd think, as a NY representative, she just couldn't do a whole lot to negatively affect these podcasts and internet celebs, so I'd actually take her at her word on this, which is surprising to me. I don't keep track of her, so I'm not sure how much of a woke true believer she is versus a leftist socialist making shrewd use of the advantages bestowed upon her by her genes within the woke environment that she inhabits, but I could believe she's the latter and ready to drop the trans ideology stuff if they seem to be disadvantageous to her political career (edit: I also stumbled on some rumors that she's pregnant, which certainly could transform her views very quickly - we'll find out within 9 months, I suppose).
Whether or not this represents Democrats coming to see the extremes of gender ideology as a political liability, I honestly think it might. When I've checked out clips from CNN, MSNBC, or NYTimes, Washington Post podcasts, i.e. media where I'd expect the mainstream Democratic view to be heavily overrepresented, I've been pleasantly surprised by how much actual self-reflection there is about how not distancing themselves from the woke side of the culture wars hurt Democrats and how little of the more expected "it's all the racist/misogynist white/black/Hispanic men's fault" narrative there is (still too much of the latter and too little of the former). In terms of high budget failures, 2024 has been the year of the woke, with a number of films, TV shows, video games, and a political party that fit the woke profile having essentially wasted literally billions of dollars. In any given failure, it's been easy to cope by pointing to non-woke reasons for the failure, but if you're greedy or power-hungry enough, that kind of pattern won't escape your notice.
I don't think this represents some major pivot by the party, though. They're coming to see it as a liability and making small corrections. What I'm hoping for is that in 2026, we'll see Democrats in contested local and Congressional elections finding success from specifically distancing themselves from the extremes of gender ideology and the like, allowing them to defeat other, more extreme Dems in the primaries, and the Republican opponents in the close 50/50 races. That'd be a sign that some actual progress is being made. However, if the next 2 years turns out to be disappointing for the electorate - which I think is the modal case for any presidential election - that'd leave the Republicans vulnerable to losing to extreme Democrats, which could embolden the extreme gender ideologues once again.
Great summary as usual.
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